14.
The years went by too fast than Ofure had bargained. She watched in agony as Collins danced from job to joblessness. She had barely closed her eyes and opened them when the twins started preparing for their common entrance. They were too many episodes of Collins drama that she had witnessed. If her principal, her savior, had not increased her salary years ago when she had been in the accident, she wondered how she would have survived. She had kept the news from her family, hoping that it would be an avenue for her to start her personal savings. This happened after Collins decided to apply for the cleaner job five months after he had rejected it. It was a miracle that the vacancy was still open. Few days into the job, he had been sacked because of his lackluster attitude towards the service. There was the driver job that he had gotten in Oregun, a place in Ikeja that Ofure hadn’t heard about.
‘You claim to have lived in Lagos your whole life. Still, you haven’t even been to Ikeja?’ Collins had taunted her.
Collins said the streets were neat and quiet, there were tall beautiful trees at the edge of the road and it was as if a cool air rested in the estate where he worked. He had promised to take Ofure there for sightseeing but he never got the chance. A week into the job, a customer had filed a complaint against him for bad driving and he had been sacked. There was the adult education class he attended because Johnny had pleaded with him to.
‘The world is moving to a computer age. If you don’t want to get dumped, education is the key’.
Collins failed the exams seven times before he gave up. The first time he tried being an Okada driver, he was harassed by the police and it was a memory that made him swore not to ever drive anything again until he died.
He had been driving across the hilly roads, scraping for young passengers. It was easy to trick them into paying expensive fares. He was stopped by the police and asked to produce his birth certificate. When Collins challenged the man’s authority, more policemen came out from the bush where they were drinking. They gave Collins herculean punishment, threatened him with imprisonment and collected all the money that he had made. They made fun of Collins and taunted him, eagles hovering around a frightened chick. After they had had their fill, they dismissed him and took away his Okada.
As Collins cried home, he thought about his life and how every effort felt as if he was pouring water into a basket. He felt as if he had been cursed, like the man called Jabez in the bible. Were the police not the same one who were supposed to protect the poor people and take care of them? Why then was he robbed? He was not rich and no matter how deep his poverty took him, he never thought to climb ahead of his situation by stealing. The police never arrested the rich, only the poor, only the vulnerable. That night, as Collins lamented his experience with the uniformed men on the high way, Ofure cried and shed her clothes as she imagined how her savings of three years had disappeared into thin air. Collins never saw the policeman again and Ofure never saw the bike that she had bought for him.